How a Fish Got Into the Telephone

Ever played the game of Telephone? You whisper a phrase to one person, who whispers it to the next, and so on down the line. By the time it reaches the final player, the original message—“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”—has often morphed into something absurd like “A slick town fox trumps the crazy log.” The words get distorted, but sometimes, a faint echo of the original survives.

Now, what if I told you that the entire history of human migration can be seen as a multi-millennial game of Telephone? And what if the whispered message was just a single, simple word: “fish”?

Consider this: the word for ‘fish’ in Finnish is kala. In Hungarian, it’s hal. On the surface, these languages seem worlds apart. Finland is a Nordic country nestled by the Baltic Sea. Hungary is a landlocked nation in Central Europe, over 1,500 kilometers away. Their grammar is notoriously complex and unrelated to their Indo-European neighbors like Swedish, German, or Russian. Yet, there it is. Kala. Hal. The similarity is uncanny. Is it a coincidence? A borrowing? Or is it something much, much deeper?

This is the story of how a single fish swam through 6,000 years of history, and how linguists followed its trail to uncover the lost world of an ancient people.

A Tale of Two Fishes (and a Language Family)

Finnish and Hungarian aren’t related by coincidence. They both belong to the Uralic language family, a group of about 38 languages spoken by roughly 25 million people across a vast swathe of Eurasia. The family’s main branches are Finno-Ugric (which includes Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian, and the Sámi languages) and Samoyedic (spoken in Siberia).

The fact that these geographically scattered languages are related means they must have all descended from a single common ancestor. Linguists call this ancestor language Proto-Uralic. It was spoken thousands of years ago, long before the invention of writing. No books or inscriptions in Proto-Uralic exist. It is a lost language.

So how can we possibly know anything about it? This is where our fish comes in. Words like Finnish kala and Hungarian hal are what linguists call cognates.

The Linguist’s Toolkit: Cognates and Sound Laws

Cognates are words in different languages that derive from the same ancestral word. They are the “genetic” proof of a family relationship. Think of them like siblings or cousins who share features from a common grandparent. They aren’t the same, but you can see the family resemblance.

It’s important not to confuse cognates with loanwords. The English word “sushi”, for example, is a direct borrowing from Japanese. We know when and how it entered the language. Cognates, on the other hand, have been in their respective languages since the very beginning, passed down from generation to generation and changing slowly over time.

But here’s the crucial part, the rule of the Telephone game that makes it solvable: the changes are not random. Languages evolve according to predictable patterns called systematic sound changes. A certain sound, in a certain environment, will almost always change in the same way. This is the detective’s master key.

Rebuilding the Ancestor: Meet *kala

Historical linguists work like forensic scientists. They gather evidence—cognates from all across a language family—and compare them to systematically reverse the changes, reconstructing the original word. Let’s do it with our fish. We’ll collect the word for ‘fish’ from several Uralic languages:

• Finnish: kala
• Estonian: kala
• Sámi: guolli
• Mansi (spoken in Siberia): hul
• Hungarian: hal

Looking at this data, a pattern emerges. The Finnic languages (Finnish, Estonian) have a ‘k’ at the beginning. The Ugric (Hungarian) and its Siberian cousins (Mansi) have an ‘h’. The Sámi ‘g’ is also a regular, predictable evolution from an earlier ‘k’.

By comparing hundreds of similar word sets, linguists established a fundamental sound law: the ‘k’ sound in Proto-Uralic was preserved in the western branches like Finnish, but it shifted to an ‘h’ sound in the Ugric branch when it appeared before a back vowel (like ‘a’, ‘o’, or ‘u’).

This isn’t a one-off fluke. Look at other examples:

• Three: Proto-Uralic *kolme → Finnish kolme, Hungarian három
• Six: Proto-Uralic *kuusi → Finnish kuusi, Hungarian hat
• To hear: Proto-Uralic *kuule- → Finnish kuulla, Hungarian hallani

The pattern is undeniable. The ‘k’ consistently becomes an ‘h’ in Hungarian before these vowels. Armed with this knowledge, we can confidently reconstruct the original Proto-Uralic word. It must have started with a ‘k’ and had a vowel like ‘a’. The reconstructed form is written as *kala.

The asterisk (*) is a crucial symbol in historical linguistics. It signifies that the word is not attested in any written source; it is a scientifically reconstructed hypothesis of what the word must have looked like in the proto-language.

From Words to Worlds: The Story of the Uralic Peoples

So we’ve reconstructed a word. What does that tell us? Everything.

The existence of the word *kala tells us that the original Proto-Uralic speakers lived in a place where there were fish. They knew them, they named them, and they almost certainly ate them. By reconstructing other words—like *puwe (tree), *śükśe (autumn), *täĺwä (winter), *wokse (birch)—linguists can paint a surprisingly detailed picture of the Proto-Uralic homeland, or Urheimat. It was a northern forest environment, likely in the vicinity of Russia’s Ural Mountains, with cold winters and plentiful rivers or lakes.

Around 4000-2000 BCE, this community began to break apart. In our millennia-long game of Telephone, the line of speakers split.

• One group moved northwest, eventually settling around the Baltic Sea. Their language evolved, but the original word for fish remained largely unchanged, becoming the kala we see in Finnish and Estonian today.
• Another group, the ancestors of the Magyars, began a remarkable, thousand-year migration south and west. They crossed the vast Eurasian steppe, eventually conquering the Carpathian Basin in the 9th century CE to become the Hungarians. Along this epic journey, their language changed dramatically. The initial ‘k’ in *kala softened into an ‘h’, giving them the modern word hal.

The fish didn’t literally get into the telephone. But the word for fish was whispered from parent to child, generation after generation, across continents and millennia. It was carried on foot and horseback from the forests of the Urals to the plains of Hungary and the shores of Finland.

So the next time you hear two words in distant languages that sound oddly similar, don’t just dismiss it as a coincidence. It might just be an echo from a lost world, a linguistic fossil waiting to tell its story—the story of how a single fish can connect us all.